Facebook knocks down massive spammer network – CNET

Facebook famously boasts it has 1.86 billion users who visit the social network every month. It looks like that number shrank on Friday.The company, which previously announced it’s cracking down on fake accounts, said it’s disrupted a major spam operation being run out of Bangladesh, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia and other countries.”The apparent intent of the campaign was to deceptively gain new friend connections by liking and interacting primarily with popular publisher Pages on our platform, after which point they would send spam,” Shabnam Shaik, a Facebook technical program manager wrote in a blog post.”We found that most of this activity was generated not through traditional mass account creation methods, but by more sophisticated means that try to mask the fact that the accounts are part of the same coordinated operation,” Shaik wrote. “By disrupting the campaign now, we expect that we will prevent this network of spammers from reaching its end goal of sending inauthentic material to large numbers of people.”